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Salem’s Lot

Leslie Wilson on Satanic Child Abuse

On 28 November 1988, Paul Ingram, a police officer, was arrested by colleagues in his office in Olympia, Washington State. His daughters, Ericka and Julie, had accused him of sexual molestation. Ingram made no attempt to deny the charges. He couldn’t remember doing anything, but he said: ‘My girls know me. They wouldn’t lie about something like this.’ He then started to build up the case against himself. Being a deeply religious man, he prayed feverishly for God’s guidance. He’d read in a magazine that there was a way of sending yourself into a trance. You had to imagine yourself entering a warm white fog. He tried this out, and the images came to him.

‘I would’ve removed her underpants or bottoms to the nightgown ... I would’ve told her to be quiet and uh, not say anything to anybody and threatened to her ... to say that I would kill her if she told anybody about this.’

His colleagues thought the repeated conditionals were only a way of dodging the issue:

‘Do you mean would’ve, or did you?’ they asked.

‘I did,’ said Ingram, quite calmly.

A psychologist, Richard Peterson, was brought in to help interrogate Ingram: his role was vital because he gave Ingram an explanation of what was happening to him. When Ingram asked why he had no memory of what he’d done, Peterson told him that it was ‘not uncommon for sexual offenders to bury the memory of their crimes because they were simply too horrible to consider’. Ingram accepted this; so did the detectives. They told his sons and his wife that they had repressed their memories of what had happened and must try to recover them. The family’s pastor became involved, trotting backwards and forwards from the police station to the family house with Paul’s latest confessions. As the investigation progressed, the Ingrams produced ever more elaborate accounts; they said there’d been buggery and gang rape. Julie Ingram said two of Paul’s colleagues had joined in when they came over to play poker. The colleagues claimed not to be able to remember anything of the kind. The accounts weren’t consistent. The family members even contradicted themselves.

Shortly after the arrest Peterson asked Ingram if he’d ever been involved in any kind of black magic. Ingram admitted that he used to look at his horoscope in the paper, but didn’t seem to understand what Peterson was driving at. One of the police officers explained what Peterson meant: ‘The Satan cult kind of thing.’

The Ingrams belonged to a fundamentalist Pentecostal sect, the Church of the Living Water. They would have been familiar with prayer in tongues, with divination, with apparently miraculous healings, and with public confessions of guilt and testimonies to their redemption. They would also have had a fervent, lively belief in Satan. It was natural, therefore, that Ingram should fear he might be possessed by evil spirits and ask his pastor to exorcise him. Pastor Bratun obliged, and expelled several evil spirits, including those of sexual immorality and gluttony. It was after this that Ingram’s ‘memories’ changed. In the trance state, he saw people in robes kneeling around a fire, then a corpse. He saw a person in a red robe who was wearing a helmet of cloth: he thought this might be the Devil. People were wailing. He remembered standing on a platform and having to sacrifice a black cat.

The Ingram girls heard about these revelations from the pastor. At first Ericka said her father was talking too much, saying things she didn’t want to remember. However, at the end of December she came up with a similar story. She said that from the time she was five years old to the time she was 12, her father regularly took her from her bed in the middle of the night and carried her out to his barn. There would be many men there, and some women; they all wore gowns and hats ‘resembling a Viking hat with horns’. There would be blood every-where, and pitchforks in the ground. A baby would be placed on a table and all the people there – including her mother and father – would circle the table and stab the baby with knives until it died. The corpse was then buried in a pit: Ericka said all the babies were about six to eight months old, though sometimes the cult used aborted babies. They would threaten Ericka, telling her they would kill her in the same way. Then they would chant, ‘you will not remember this’ over and over again. Between them, Ingram and his daughter had produced an account of satanic ritual abuse.

The month before Paul’s arrest the whole family had sat down to watch a documentary called Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground, which described rituals in the course of which children were not only abused themselves but made to take part in the sort of ritual murders that Ericka had described. Belief in satanic ritual abuse was on the increase in the United States: Peterson had recently sent a questionnaire about it to therapists in Seattle and Tacoma and found that a quarter of his respondents had treated people who claimed to have been abused in this way in childhood.

The first survivor story, by Michelle Smith, a Canadian, had been published in 1980. It gave an account of memories she had recovered when she was having therapy after a miscarriage. Most of these memories had been accessed in a hypnotic trance. She said her mother had taken her to the satanic cult’s ceremonies, where she had been tortured and raped and had witnessed infant sacrifice. After that, there were several allegations of large-scale satanic abuse of toddlers at day-care centres in California and Washington State, and an explosion of stories from alleged survivors. These stories are now being told in Britain, too. Ericka Ingram’s story is very similar to an anonymous account published in summer 1994 in the British teenage girl’s magazine Mizz. The narrator describes a network of cults whose members sexually abuse children and practise infant sacrifice. The infants are the children of the cult’s adolescent girls, who are used as ‘brood mares’.

The police dug all over the Ingrams’ small-holding to search for bones, but the only one that surfaced was an elk bone. The doctor who examined the Ingram girls could find no evidence of physical abuse. In fact, there was no evidence apart from the depositions of the Ingram family, and these were contradictory and confused. Paul Ingram never managed to remember anything straightforwardly. At one stage, the detectives thought he might have been brainwashed by his fellow-satanists, so they brought in Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist who was an expert on cults. Deeply suspicious of the family’s recovered memories, Ofshe tried an experiment of his own. He told Ingram that one of his sons and one of his daughters had accused him – they hadn’t – of making them have sex with each other in front of him. When Ofshe asked the children if they remembered anything like this, they said they didn’t. Ingram went into his white-foggy trance state and, duly beaming, produced a complete, pornographically-detailed scenario.

According to Lawrence Wright, the author of Remembering Satan: Recovered Memory and the Shattering of a Family,[1] Ingram had always been given to extremes. A disciplinarian to his children, fanatically thrifty, absorbed in his Church; over-zealous in his work, he handed out more tickets for minor traffic offences than any of his colleagues. Even so, he was harsher with himself than he had ever been to anyone else. He was not charged with any exotic offences connected with satanic abuse, but only with third-degree rape, to which he insisted on pleading guilty. After that he decided that all his confessions had been false, but it was too late. His daughter Ericka appeared in court and demanded the maximum sentence. Other men convicted of the same offence would have got six months with the option of treatment. Since Ingram was now denying his guilt, the judge decided treatment wouldn’t be helpful. He was sent down for 20 years.

In 1613, a young German girl, Maria Ostertag of Ellwangen, came to the authorities, confessed that she was a witch and implicated 34 other people. She had copulated with Satan in horrific secret rituals – his penis, she said, was hard, cold and hurtful. She also claimed she had desecrated the sacrament by mixing it with dung and using it in magical potions. It is impossible to know what exactly brought her to confess, but her aunt had been burned, and witches’ families were highly suspect. Her reward was to be executed with the sword rather than burned alive. She was luckier than some. A nine-year-old German boy, Johannes Bernhardt, was supposed to have been initiated into witchcraft at school. He said he had signed himself over to the Devil with his own blood, then flown to the diabolic sabbat, where Satan had intercourse with him: this had recurred on many occasions. He also said that the Devil was ‘hard as horn’. Young Bernhardt was treated as a full-fledged heretic and burned with four others. Had the Ingram case come up at this time, the entire family might have been executed.

The Romans accused the Christians of practising orgies and child sacrifice. The Christians, once established in power, made similar accusations against the Jews and many sects they deemed heretical. Michael Constantine Psellos, the Byzantine philosopher, wrote about the Bogomils:

In the evening, when the candles are lit, at the time when we celebrate the redemptive Passion of Our Lord, they bring together, in a house appointed for the purpose, young girls whom they have initiated into their rites. Then they extinguish the candles, so that the light shall not be witness to their abominable deeds, and throw themselves lasciviously on the girls; each one on whomever first falls into his hands, no matter whether she be his sister, his daughter, or his mother ... When this rite has been completed, each goes home; and after waiting nine months, until the time has come for the unnatural children of such unnatural seed to be born, they come together again at the same place. Then, on the third day after the birth, they tear the miserable babies from their mothers’ arms. They cut their tender flesh all over with sharp knives and catch the stream of blood in basins. They throw the babies, still breathing and gasping, onto the fire, to be burned to ashes. After which, they mix the ashes with the blood in the basins, and so make an abominable drink, with which they secretly pollute their food and drink: like those who mix poison with hippocras or other sweet drinks.

Psellos had heard about these rites from a Thracian – he had no first-hand knowledge of them. Believing that the Bogomils worshipped Satan, he saw their rites as deliberate attempts to spread the kingdom of Antichrist on earth. Heretics and Jews were regularly accused of infanticide, unnatural sexual practices and devil-worship in the Middle Ages, but in the 15th century, the pattern changed: instead of accusing existing dissident groups, the Inquisitors asserted that there was a new heretical group operating covertly within the population. These were the witches.

Before the Great Witchhunt, witches were not thought to be part of any organised group or conspiracy. The local witch, who was usually but not invariably a woman, was supposed to possess maleficium, an evil power that enabled her to raise storms and thereby wreck ships and crops; to destroy cattle, spoil butter and beer; and to bring about sudden and inexplicable illness and death, especially among young children and babies. Her victims sometimes turned to the village cunning person or witchdoctor for help; the tougher course of action was to take the witch to the religious or civil authorities and have her tried. (After prosecutions for witchcraft came to a halt in the late 17th century, communities sometimes lynched their witches themselves.) But from the 15th century onwards, a woman who was accused of witchcraft by her neighbours would find that the judges had a new agenda: they wanted to ascertain, not whether she had harmed her neighbours, but whether she had dedicated herself to Satan.

They would press her to admit that she belonged to an organisation of devil-worshippers, that she had sealed her allegiance by having intercourse with Satan and with her fellow witches (even her own sons or father). She was also likely to be accused of sacrificing infants to her Master. If she denied these allegations, she would be questioned under torture. The panic spread across the country. As soon as a witch confessed that she had been present at such an occasion the inquisitor would want to know who else had been there. The witch might then name women in other towns – women she knew from marketing, or with whom she wanted to settle scores. No doubt she often simply guessed at names to stop the torture.

The best-known episode, and one of the last, occurred at Salem in Massachusetts Bay Colony – it was the subject of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. It began when the minister’s nine-year-old daughter, Betty Parris, and her cousin, Abigail Williams, complained that they were being tormented by invisible beings. Three local women, convicted of bewitching them, named other witches; then more girls – as well as adults of both sexes – accused their neighbours of conspiring with the Devil to afflict them. The witch-hunt spread out into the colony when the accusers were taken to other towns to identify witches. Nineteen people were hanged at Salem, and, because the judges decided to spare the lives of ‘confessours’, many more were imprisoned for life. The concept of the sabbat was crucial to the panic: Abigail Williams asserted that ‘the Witches had a Sacrament ... at a house in the Village, and that they had Red Bread and Red Drink.’ Another accuser, Mercy Lewis, said: ‘they did eat Red Bread like Mans Flesh, and would have her eat some: but she would not.’ Like Psellos, the Salem authorities believed that they had stumbled on a diabolic conspiracy: ‘These witches, whereof above a score have now confessed,’ Cotton Mather wrote in Wonders of the Invisible World, ‘have met in hellish rendezvous, wherein the confessours do say they have had their diabolical sacraments, imitating the baptism and the supper of our Lord. In these hellish meetings these monsters have associated themselves to do no less a thing than to destroy the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ in these parts of the world.’

By the 18th century the ruling classes had become sceptical about witchcraft and the laws against witches were revoked or allowed to lapse. The sabbat became a historical curiosity. In this century, witches have become feminist and New Age icons, revered as victims of a Christian patriarchy’s persecution and misrepresentation. ‘Wiccan’ cults of nature-worship have sprung up, as have a small number of Satanist cults. Now the belief in the satanic sabbat seems to have returned.

Belief in ‘ritual’ abuse and satanic ritual is many-layered, however. At the extreme end are American fundamentalists, who believe that

an international network of secretive ‘hard-core’ satanic cults are linked together to infiltrate the higher levels of societal power structures in all societies, enabling the destruction of that society by undermining its moral standards by making snuff movies and trading in narcotics. They gain their members by a hierarchical structure of recruitment, first catching teens through their dabblings in rock music and games, and selecting the best for initiation into witchcraft cults, from which the ‘hard-core’ are chosen. The ultimate aim is to induce world chaos which will encourage the populace to accept Satan – in personified form – as the earth’s ruler.

The full text of this essay is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

Letters

To judge by her article on ‘Satanic Child Abuse’ (LRB, 23 March), Leslie Wilson seems genuinely to believe satanic abuse is a myth and that the many people working in this field are fanatical extremists engaged on a modern witch-hunt. The truth is that this abuse happens and most of us are more involved with helping the victims than with catching the perpetrators. But unless it is exposed, there is little hope of doing either effectively.

Ten years ago, I was as sceptical as she appears to be. I regarded the subjects of witchcraft and black magic as boring mumbo-jumbo. However, I was forced to accept the reality of satanist abuse from hearing my own patients’ accounts and those from other members of Rains (Ritual Abuse Information Network and Support). These survivors have no contact, yet their descriptions of abuse are remarkably similar to each other and to those given by children. My account of cult practices was a compilation of this information and was confirmed by many sources.

Both my written pieces from which she quoted were strictly limited in length. Hence not everything is explained. Had Leslie Wilson interviewed me before writing her article, answers and some evidence would have been provided. For instance, the clinical outcome after disclosure was improvement in all cases with a steady reduction of symptoms. Were she a clinician, she would know that both retraction and an initial increase in disturbance, when first disclosing, are common features of abuse survivors and do not imply that the allegations are false. As she has mentioned the so-called ‘False Memory Syndrome’, whose proponents dispute the validity of any recovered memories, I must point out that none of my patients had forgotten their involvement in satanism, although some traumatic memories had been repressed. These were not recovered through hypnosis.

Why is it so hard to believe that professional people could be members of satanic cults? Religious and political extremists have been members of most professions from time immemorial. All the criminal activities, such as child abuse and pornography, child murder and drug-dealing, allegedly performed by satanists, are committed by others who are not satanists. Other cult leaders such as Jim Jones and David Koresh have brought about mass slaughter. Personally, I, too, have difficulty with the concept of satanic worship and I am no nearer to believing in black or any other sort of magic than I ever was, but it is almost equally hard to understand how grown men, mostly from the professional classes, can go along with the extraordinary initiation rites involved in Freemasonry.

Joan Coleman
Guildford

I was impressed by Leslie Wilson’s article. In the course of reading the British and American literature on the subject I have been astonished and appalled by the willingness of writers and specialists with impressive qualifications to repeat manifest falsehoods and absurdities, and their failure to recognise grotesque, transparent and wicked miscarriages of justice. However, there are some points in her article that are worth going into in more detail.

Leslie Wilson briefly mentions the 1980 book Michelle Remembers as providing the main impetus for the anti-satanism panic. This book is so totally fantastic that it is hard to understand how anybody, let alone responsible professionals, could have taken it seriously. Its claims of involvement in a satanic cult closely parallel Rosemary’s Baby and Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out. It is written from the standpoint of ultra-traditional Catholicism and includes claims of supernatural events such as the appearance to the satanic cultists of the Devil himself (who prophesies that Armageddon will come in the Eighties as a result of a Soviet-Iranian alliance, an idea that was then popular with US right-wing Christians). Like the two other best known US ‘satanist survivor’ books, Lauren Stratford’s Satan Underground and Mike Warnke’s The Satan Seller, it includes autobiographical information that is demonstrably false. There are two similar British works by Doreen Irvine and Audrey Harper, chiefly sold in evangelical bookshops. Neither is checkable at any point and neither of the authors states that she has contacted the police although they both claim to have witnessed serious criminal offences.

Wilson mentions the US day-care centre satanism cases as being parallel to the British ones. The recent Ayrshire case, where a group of children in care were returned to their parents, gives clear indication of cultural contagion of British investigations by these earlier US cases. One allegation in Ayrshire was of sexual abuse in a hot air balloon, a detail that occurred in the 1988 Edenton North Carolina day-care satanism trial. This latter case, incidentally, was remarkable – even by the standards of such cases – for the highly bizarre nature of the allegations. Robert Kelley, a day-care centre proprietor, was imprisoned after children told tales of his shooting babies, taking children in his car as he robbed banks, throwing them to sharks and taking them for rides in a spaceship.

The parallels between Britain and the US should not be pressed too far, however. There is a major difference in that, while most of the British accused have been members of what it is now fashionable to call the underclass, the US cases have mostly taken place in middle-class settings and have originated not in interventions by the authorities but in acts of moral vigilantism by parents against alleged abusers. This difference is probably due to the fact that while the British satanism panic is largely confined to professionals in social and psychiatric work, and is spread by books and seminars aimed at a limited audience, the US panic is more general and popular, being spread by other means including rumours, sermons and TV talk shows.

Wilson is certainly correct to point to historical parallels such as the witch mania and allegations made against heretics. But she misses the most relevant of all historical parallels: that of Jewish ritual murder of Christian children.

These stories, common in the Middle Ages, were revived in the 1905 Russian pogroms and by the Nazis. In the latter cases they were combined with tales of a Jewish plot to overthrow society. Some modern anti-satanists make similar allegations. Dr Joan Coleman, who is quoted in the article, believes that Satanists are involved in drugs, arms smuggling and ‘snuff movies’ (another contemporary myth). Even more disturbing than Dr Coleman’s ideas are the fantasies of Dr Corydon Hammond, a US abuse specialist who claimed at a conference endorsed by the American Medical Association that satanism had been brought to the US by one Dr Greenbaum, allegedly a Hasidic Jew who had shared Kabbalistic secrets with the Nazis and had been brought to the US by the CIA in 1945.

When nonsense like this can be taken seriously it is not surprising that attempts are being made to use the satanism myth to revive other images of child sacrifice. Apparently British neo-Nazis have recently been circularising nurseries with leaflets about ‘Jewish ritual murder’. Those who, like Valerie Sinason, compare satanism sceptics to Holocaust deniers might care to reflect on those parallels. One can only hope some of the believers will read Leslie Wilson’s historical summary, since the ignorance their own writings show about the witch mania seems as total as the confidence with which they proclaim that ritual abuse dates back hundreds of years. Children for the Devil, a book by the British journalist Tim Tate which is taken seriously by many professionals, attempts to prove this claim in a section that cites as evidence confessions made during the witch mania as well as blatant historical forgeries.

There is another historical parallel worth pursuing. Although the Malleus Maleficarum was written by two Dominicans, Protestant witch-hunters used it as a manual and their works were in turn quoted by Catholics. The modern satanism panic is kept alive by a similarly bizarre set of allies. On one hand there are evangelical Christian groups such as the Outreach Trust; on the other liberal professionals. Nor does this exhaust the list of strange bedfellows. The group Accuracy About Abuse, which champions the accuracy of recovered memories, is taken seriously in the media in spite of being run by Marjorie Orr, whose main credentials as a therapist consist of being the astrologer to the Daily Express.

Particularly disturbing is the role played in maintaining the panic by some feminists such as Beatrix Campbell. It is hard to imagine the reason for this since in many of the cases women have been accused (unlike cases concerning genuine child sex rings, which rarely involve women); at least one US case, that of Kelly Michaels, was clearly influenced by anti-lesbian prejudice.

The satanism panic in the last decade has been so clearly irrational that one cannot help speculating on the motivation behind it. While many of its proponents may be well-meaning, it is hard to escape the conclusion that some of them are people harbouring sadistic fantasies which they project onto others. Certainly, Wilson’s quote from one professional who justifies oppressive questioning of children by saying that some children really want to continue even when they say no is disturbingly similar to the rationalisations of real-life child abusers.

Joan Coleman (Letters, 20 April) is quite wrong to suggest that I might regard the subjects of witchcraft and black magic as boring mumbo-jumbo, as she apparently once did. I find them fascinating. Nor did I set out to prove that the extreme satanic cult she describes doesn’t exist: I went into the area with an open mind. I have no problem believing that people belong to dubious cults, and I am unsurprised by any cruelty that human beings carry out on each other. But this is meant to be a cult of mass murder, and there is no evidence that its members exist or ever have existed, or that they have ever killed anyone. There is ample evidence that during the Great Witch-Hunt the authorities, convinced of the cult’s reality, killed thousands of people.

‘Why is it so hard,’ she asks, ‘to believe that professional people could be members of satanic cults?’ She has misread me. Of course professional people can belong to all sorts of strange organisations. However, as she well knows, people who believe in satanic ritual abuse explain the lack of evidence by the hypothesis that well-placed satanists are actively involved in a conspiracy to suppress it. If she were to reread my piece, she would see that conspiracy theory is part of belief in the satanic sabbat. I don’t think she and her colleagues are necessarily fanatical witchhunters, but the evidence of history is that ordinary decent people can commit the most appalling injustices: all it needs is an ideology powerful enough to wreck their sense of proportion.